29/01/2020
IT’S NOT THE TIME TO BE PRIMITIVE!
The Representative of the People must not be primitive, ignorant of natural forces, dreaded by their approach by not finding a solution to eliminate POLITICAL VIOLENCE amongst us in Zambia, hiding from the perils that threaten those who put them in positions of power. As a People and as a Nation we must learn to understand Nature’s phenomena, Zambia must realize that though these may destroy life and cause great loss, they also bring relief. To the earnest citizen of Zambia, it must be apparent that the accumulated forces in our social and economic life, culminating in Political acts of violence that we see now, are similar to the terrors of the atmosphere, manifested in storm and lightning while we sit and wait.
To thoroughly appreciate the truth of this view, the electorate of Zambia must feel intensely the indignity of our social wrongs; Zambia’s very being must throb with the pain, the sorrow, the despair millions of people are daily made to endure. Indeed, unless we have become a part of humanity, we cannot even faintly understand the just indignation that accumulates in a human soul, the burning, surging passion that makes the storm inevitable as we go to the polls in 2021.
The ignorant mass looks upon the man who makes a violent protest against our social and economic iniquities as upon a wild beast, a cruel, heartless monster, whose joy it is to destroy life and bathe in blood; or at best, as upon an irresponsible lunatic. Yet nothing is further from the truth. As a matter of fact, those who have seen the character and personality of the so-called “Honorable Members of Parliament [men and women], or who have come in close contact with law but are not doing anything to push for an ANTI POLITICAL VIOLENCE LAW that will save the lives of Zambians, are agreed that it is their super-insensitiveness to the wrong and injustice surrounding them which compels them to pay the toll of our social crimes.
"There is a truism that the on the streets of power seem always to forget when there is abusing the Electorate, or whatever party happens to be his or her bête noire for the moment, as the cause of POLITICAL VIOLENCE is perpetrated by those who are supposed to stand up and SAY NO TO POLITICAL VIOLENCE. This indisputable fact is that political homicidal outrages have, from time immemorial elections that we have held in this so-called “Christian Nation” Zambia, been the reply of goaded and desperate classes of politicians, and goaded and desperate individuals, to wrongs from their fellowmen, which they feel to be intolerable. Such acts are the violent recoil from Political Violence, whether aggressive or repressive; they are the last desperate struggle of outraged and exasperated human nature for breathing space and life. POLITICAL CRIME IS A CRIME and it must come to an End!
By Oliver Mupila Kameya-Zambia's Anti Political Violence Advocate and Initiator of the Anti Political Violence Bill.
